ISSUE: Summer 1982
With the 1982 elections only a few months away, Holt, Rinehart & Winston has published a sixth cloth edition of Jack C. Piano and Milton Greenberg’s The American Political Dictionary, in which the authors run the gamut of American politics from A to Z, from the local level to Capitol Hill, with more than 1200 entries describing and defining the U. S, system of government and politics [$19.50]. Oxford has come out with a fourth edition of Henry J. Abraham’s Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States, a completely updated analysis of “all appropriate components involved in judicial interpretation of constitutional law,” including a section on gender discrimination [$24.95 cloth, $8.95 paper]. Praised as “a major contribution to American social and intellectual history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. , The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800—1850 by Whitney R. Cross is now available in paperback from Cornell [$8.95]. Vintage Books is offering a paperback edition of Pauline Maier’s The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams, a work praised by Newsday for offering “valuable insights into what divergent forces work to make a revolutionary” [$7.95]. Illinois has reprinted Virginia Yans-McLaughlin’s Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880—1930 in paperback, a winner of the 1978 Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History awarded by the American Historical Association [$8.95], With a new introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. , Louisiana has a new paperback edition of the famous Southern manifesto of 1930, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, with essays from such literary luminaries of Dixie as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren [$6.95]. Pantheon Books has issued a paperback edition of James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis’s Mississippi: Conflict and Change, a controversial textbook which received the 1975 Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction [$8.95].
Touchstone Books has published a paperback edition of Bernard Grun’s The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, describing “who did what concurrently through the ages of man” in such areas as history and politics, literature and the theater, religion and philosophy [$14.50]. Isabel de Madariaga’s account of Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great is a recent Yale paperback and a work hailed by Choice magazine as a “masterly study” which “will probably be a standard work for a generation” [$14.95; also available in cloth for $45.00]. Harper’s Colophon Books has come out with a revised and augmented edition of Hugh Thomas’s History of the World, a book acclaimed by the late C. P. Snow as “entirely fresh . . .simmering with ideas” and by New Yorker reviewer Naomi Bliven as “a remarkable work about the past which is very much of the present” [$10.95]. New York University Press has reprinted a second cloth edition of John Lynch’s two-volume account of Spain under the Hobsburgs, with volume one covering Empire and Absolutism, 1516—1598 and volume two devoted to Spain and America, 1598—1700 [$74.50 for the two-volume set]. The 16th century is also the subject of J. H. Elliott’s Europe Divided, 1559—1598, the latest in Cornell’s paperback “History of Europe” series [$6.95], Two recent Vintage Books deal with subjects very much on the minds of men these days, the first being Gregg Herken’s The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945—1950 [$7.95] and the second a reprint of Alfred Grosser’s The Western Alliance: European-American Relations Since 1945 [$7.95]. Another recent Vintage Book is Philippe Aries’ The Hour of Our Death, in which a noted French historian recounts the ways in which men through the ages have dealt with “the great equalizer” [$9.95], Bison Books has a paperback edition of Frederick W. Marks III’s Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, a study lauded by TR biographer Edmund Morris for “its elegance, brevity, and courageous originality” [$5.95]. Johns Hopkins has prepared a revised, paperback edition of Dr. Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine [$7.95]. The World of Herodotus is recounted by Aubrey De Selincourt in a recent North Point Press paperback [$10.50]. McGraw-Hill Paperbacks has printed an edition of W. Scott Morton’s China: Its History and Culture, tracing the evolvement of Chinese society from neolithic times to the present [$7.95].
In celebration of its 40th anniversary, Pantheon Books has launched two new paperback series, Pantheon Modern Classics and Pantheon International Crime, each of which made its debut with four titles. Pantheon Modern Classics features these works: Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “ the remarkable story of a Sicilian prince perched on the brink of historic change” [$5.95]; Yashar Kemal’s Mehmed, My Hawk, “ a modern-day Robin Hood’s struggles against the beauty and brutality of Turkish peasant life” [$6.95]; Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life, “ a brilliant portrayal of a coming of age amidst war and revolution” in early 20th-century Russia [$8.95]; and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, a novel set in a military boarding school in the Austria of the Hapburgs [$5.95]. The Pantheon International Crime series opens with these offerings: James McClure’s The Blood of an Englishman involving “two seemingly unrelated murders” in “a shocking portrayal of South African society” [$2.95]; William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, “ the case of a brutally assaulted and murdered young Glasgow girl” [$2.95]; Peter Dickinson’s The Poison Oracle, in which the only witness of a murder is a chimpanzee [$2.95]; and James McClure’s The Steam Pig, the first book in McClure’s “highly acclaimed South African series” [$2.95]. Three recent Vintage Books are The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen [$8.95], Par Lagerkvist’s Pilgrim at Sea [$2.95], and Raymond Carver’s short-story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love [$2.95]. Vintage has also reissued in a one-volume edition two Nancy Mitford novels—The Pursuit of Love in a Cold Climate— recently brought to television in a “Masterpiece Theatre” production [$2.95]. Ecco Press has published a new cloth edition of Elizabeth Hardwick’s The Ghostly Lover, which first appeared in 1945 as that writer’s first novel [$12.95], Dutton is offering a cloth edition of Amanda Cross’s The James Joyce Murder, first published in 1967 [$10.25]. Random House has come out with a paperback edition of Thomas McGuane’s Nobody’s Angel [$6.95].
Anchor Books has published a newly revised paperback edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman with commentary by Harold Bloom, an edition widely hailed since its first publication in 1965 as “the best available text of Blake’s poetry and prose” [$19.95]. A recent Prentice-Hall publication is a third cloth edition of Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, whose new features include more works by women and black writers and a chapter on television and movie writing with a sample film script [$13.95], Yale has issued a paperback edition of Geoffrey H. Hartman’s Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today, a work picked as one of the Notable Books of the Year by The New fork Times Book Review after its publication in 1980 [$6.95; also available in cloth for $25.00].
